Still from Life: Untitled. © Directors Box.

Life: Untitled, the 2019 directorial debut from Kana Yamada, is a film that bristles. (It is based on Yamada’s stage play.) Focusing on a contemporary Tokyo escort service called Crazy Bunny, it follows Kano, a young woman who initially attempts to become a sex worker as a way to escape what she explains are the constant failures inherent in an ordinary life. She panics during her first appointment and is instead reassigned as an employee on the office side of the service, scheduling client appointments and buying toilet paper. It’s through her eyes that we get to know the other people working there and the indignities and joys that make up their daily lives. Yamada is unflinching in her criticisms of contemporary Japan’s gender dynamics and sexism, and she asks dark questions about what the commodification of sex means for her characters, from the always-smiling Mahiru—who frequently remarks that she’d like to burn the entire city down and eventually reveals a history of sexual trauma—to Hagio, a male employee who sleeps with older customers on the side and holds nothing back in an ugly, judgmental monologue to Kano. The film is currently available to stream online in the U.S. until July 30 as part of the Japan Society’s annual Japan Cuts film festival. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Film still from Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s Dancing at Dusk—A Moment with Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” © polyphem Filmproduktion.

In March, a formidable troupe of thirty-eight dancers from fourteen African countries was preparing for a world tour of Pina Bausch’s 1975 The Rite of Spring. The pandemic interrupted plans for international travel just before their opening night in Dakar. But the group nevertheless made the best of the situation, moving operations to a neighboring beach for a final run-through before cameras. The result: Dancing at Dusk, a thirty-nine-minute dance film available on Vimeo through July. Bausch’s Dionysian choreography, with its invigorating and relentless rhythms, unearths dark truths about human relationships and suffering—themes only intensified by the prelockdown timing of the performance. While the entire ballet is an athletic feat, Anique Ayiboe’s performance as “the chosen one” is particularly impressive, her rhythmic convulsions giving body to the tresillos and syncopations of Stravinsky’s score. At the end of her solo, she leans forward on a dangerous incline, her arms outstretched. As if pushed by the last spattering of chords, she collapses, and the ballet ends. The sun is nearly set, and a thin sliver of ocean delineates sand from sky. The film crew erupts into slow applause as the tired dancers limp toward one another, laughing and embracing. On the day of this performance, the world, too, was on the precipice of a collapse. But as I watched the dancers embrace, I was reminded that there may yet be some hope, some eventual time for shared recovery. —Elinor Hitt  Read More

Marie NDiaye. Photo: © Francesca Mantovani.

No one is condemned to being human in the world of Marie NDiaye. People become birds, skulk home as canine omens, as vapors, or transmogrify into logs. What a relief such transformations can be, since consciousness, for NDiaye, is a fraught and painful thing. Even when writing in the third person, she has an extraordinary ability to trap readers in the heads of her characters, leaving us to rattle around in their skulls, crouch in the dark confines, and peek out to witness their humiliation. In the face of a painful reckoning with the world, the mind often gives way. Perhaps the cruelest element of her work is not that her characters suffer but that they are so often left unable to perceive it. That Time of Year, first published in 1994 and elegantly rendered in English by her veteran translator, Jordan Stump, will appear this September from Two Lines Press. Herman, a Parisian, extends the family holiday past August, the end of tourist season. It is abruptly fall—a deluge begins, and his wife and son have vanished. The inhabitants of the village have no interest in the case. Herman, too, finds himself unwilling to break social codes, to plead for help or for their return. He lingers, coming to note certain details: the web of surveillance (run fast); everyone’s exceedingly blonde hair (run far). Roots peek out beneath the dye and give away the newcomers; Herman learns he is not the first to have lost his family. The only way to find them, he is told, is to stay and become one with the village. “You can’t very well change your skin in two days, can you?” There is no distinction between assimilation and dissolution: to find your family, “you have to lose every last bit of yourself.” Rain, brain, go away; the downpour continues, and Herman’s memory and body seem to dissolve. In this self-annihilation, he finds “a timid sort of pleasure.” There is a strange pleasure, too, in losing oneself in this remarkable tale. It feels true even as it is utterly unreal; it seizes the brain like a very bad dream. —Chris Littlewood  Read More

Arundhati Roy. Photo: © Mayank Austen Soofi.

Haymarket Books will release Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., a slim new collection of essays by Arundhati Roy, this September, but if there were ever a book that, given some minor magic wand, I would abracadabra into publication, it’s this one. The nine essays were written recently, between 2018 and 2020, “two years that … have felt like two hundred.” The words I elided in that sentence are “in India”—as she has said earlier, we should not forfeit “the rights to our own tragedies,” and Roy’s writing is implacably, unrelentingly specific, digging into the smallest details. That zoom has the paradoxical impact of also revealing broader, more general patterns, fundamental forces that take on different shapes. It’s impossible to read this book now, in America, and not hear the ways in which it is talking to us, too. Given the moment, I think a bit about sickness, how a disease can cause a fever in this person, a heart attack in that person, seemingly nothing at all in the third, but still be the same disease. (“I have begun to wonder why fascism—although it is by no means the same everywhere—is so recognizable across histories and cultures.”) And what comes after? As Roy puts it at the end of Azadi’s introduction: “Reimagining the world. Only that.” —Hasan Altaf  Read More

Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Ching-Ming Cheung.

When the pandemic hit and we were suddenly living in a world I had never quite imagined, I turned to Octavia E. Butler to lose myself in a world she had. I read her Xenogenesis trilogy, collected in the single-volume edition Lilith’s Brood (please try to unsee the cover—whatever fool decided that these masterworks of speculative literature should be dressed up like romance novels is working in the wrong design department). Butler imagines a postapocalyptic Earth where almost all humans have perished in a nuclear disaster except for a handful who were saved and genetically reengineered by aliens. These aliens, called the Oankali, make it their business to visit broken worlds and “trade” genes with other species in hopes of mutual upgrade. In recent weeks, during the uprising following the murder of George Floyd, I have been grateful again for this trilogy. Butler was, unsurprisingly, ahead of her time in many ways. The Oankali have three genders, one of which is neither female nor male, and they view human racism and hatred with great confusion, as their whole MO is accepting and learning from difference. Of course, Butler’s epic also reveals much of the worst of human nature, and she’s helped me think about that, too—about what needs to change and how we might change it. —Craig Morgan Teicher  Read More

Still of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground. Courtesy of Milestone Films.

Sara, the protagonist of Kathleen Collins’s film Losing Ground, cannot admit that she is a professor first and a wife second, and therein lies her problem. As her desire to break free from her steady, rational nature finds expression in academic fervor, it is held tighter by the bonds of domestic life—a heartbreaking portrayal of what is so often irreconcilable in womanhood. Losing Ground is streaming for free right now on the Criterion Channel, along with films by Julie Dash, Maya Angelou, Cheryl Dunye, and many others. —Lauren Kane  Read More